ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 discusses the complexities surrounding the government’s sustained tentativeness in situating higher education in Bangladesh as neither ‘for-profit’ nor ‘not for-profit’, or both. It explores how the government of Bangladesh has developed a distinctive form of the private university model by remaining non-committal to either position. To identify this unique position, this chapter first looks at how the idea of the ‘private university’ has been shaped across the globe over the last few decades and then discusses how far some of the features of global private universities align with the idea of the private university in Bangladesh. The chapter concludes with the assertion that the concept of the private university in Bangladesh was done through reference to the understanding that an academic institution could be set up by a person or a group of people in a way that is neither ‘for-profit’ nor ‘not for-profit’, or both, although the government might still control its existence through regulations and state-sanctioned power of quality assurance bodies, such as the UGC.
